Best AI Receptionist in 2026: Flat-Fee Services vs Per-Minute Voice Agents

NextPhone charges a flat $199 a month for unlimited calls, while Vapi bills $0.05 for every minute before you add a voice, a model or a phone line. Those two prices describe two different products, and most buyers only discover that after a demo.

An AI receptionist is now cheap enough for a two-person plumbing firm. The change in 2026 is that the market has split in two: finished services you switch on, and voice-agent platforms you assemble yourself. If you run a small office and miss calls while you work, the split decides whether you spend an afternoon or a month getting set up.

Two kinds of product answer the phone

The first kind is a turnkey AI receptionist. You sign up, point it at your website, forward your number, and it answers. NextPhone, Vocapable and Certus AI work this way. You pay a monthly fee, sometimes with a minute allowance, and the vendor owns the voice, the model and the phone plumbing.

The second kind is a voice-agent platform. Retell AI, Vapi, Bolna AI and Plivo sell the parts: speech recognition, a language model, a synthetic voice and telephony, metered by the minute. You or an agency write the prompts, connect the calendar and test the edge cases.

Neither is better in general. A platform is cheaper per minute and far more flexible. A turnkey service is cheaper per hour of your own time. That trade runs through every recommendation below.

A third group sits between them: vertical agents built for one trade. Restaurants, car dealerships, GP clinics and home-service contractors each have one or more on HokAI, and most sell on a quote rather than a price list.

How to choose an AI receptionist: five questions before the demo

Answer these before you book a single sales call. Each one removes products from the list.

1. How many minutes do you take a month? Under about 500, per-minute billing is almost always cheaper. Above 1,500, flat fees start to win.
2. Who will build it? If nobody on your team will write prompts and test call flows, rule out the platforms or budget for an agency.
3. What must it do besides talk? Booking into Google or Outlook, writing to a CRM like Clio or HubSpot, taking a card payment, or pushing an order into a POS. Integrations decide more deals than voices do.
4. Does it need to transfer to a human? Check how many transfer destinations the plan allows and whether transfers are warm (announced) or cold.
5. Are the calls regulated? Health data needs a Business Associate Agreement (BAA) under HIPAA. Outbound AI calls in the US fall under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act.

If those answers point in different directions, a short brief in Smart Match will rank the directory against your own call volume and stack.

The shortlist: the best AI receptionist for each kind of business

We read every vendor's own pricing page on 28 October 2026. Prices below are the entry tier, in US dollars.

Here is how we would pick, by the buyer rather than by the product:

• A law firm or a trade business that wants it done for them: NextPhone. It is one of two flat-priced services we read, the only one built for general business calls, and its plans connect to legal practice software.
• A restaurant: Certus AI. It takes the order itself and sends it to the POS.
• A tiny office with a few calls a day: Vocapable, the cheapest way to have a real number answered.
• A developer or agency building for clients: Retell AI if you want to ship this week, Vapi if you want to swap every component.
• Callers who speak Hindi or another Indian language: Bolna AI, with Rootle as the sales-led alternative.

What an AI receptionist costs at 300, 1,000 and 2,000 minutes

List prices hide the real comparison, so we ran each one at three monthly volumes. A 1,000-minute month is roughly 330 three-minute calls.

How we built each row, so you can redo it with your own volume:

• Vocapable adds $0.09 for each minute past the 250 included, and bills a 30-second minimum per AI-handled call.
• echowin is $0.20 a minute plus $10 a month for one number.
• Retell AI uses the $0.15-a-minute example its own pricing calculator shows (model, voice infrastructure and text-to-speech), before any phone-number cost.
• Vapi adds its $0.05 hosting fee to the cheapest transcriber, model, voice and Telnyx transport rates on its page, which comes to about $0.087 a minute.
• Plivo combines its $0.03 agent minute with $0.008 inbound telephony; number rental is extra and we did not price it.
• AgentPhone is 22 cents a minute when it hosts the agent, plus one $3 number.

Two break-even points matter. Against echowin, NextPhone's flat fee wins above roughly 945 minutes a month. Against Vocapable Starter, it wins above roughly 1,917 minutes.

The platforms look dramatically cheaper. They are, on the invoice. What the table cannot show is the time a first build takes: prompts, calendar and CRM connections, transfer rules and a round of test calls. No vendor publishes that figure. Price it at your own hourly rate before you decide.

Turnkey AI receptionists, product by product

These are the services a business owner can run without writing a prompt.

NextPhone: flat pricing for firms that take a lot of calls

NextPhone's plans start at $199 a month on Pro, which you set up yourself in about five minutes, according to its pricing page.

Growth, at $299, adds a team that builds and tunes the agent for you and writes to CRMs including HubSpot and Clio. Scale, at $599, adds custom call routing and two-way texting from your own number.

Every tier carries unlimited calls, no per-minute charges, no overage fees and no setup fee. It offers 30 voices in 14 languages, books into Google and Outlook calendars or Calendly, Acuity, Cal.com and OnceHub, and transfers to up to 10 people on the lower tiers. Pro comes with seven free days.

The fit is clearest for law firms, because Clio Manage, Clio Grow and MyCase are named integrations. The weak spot is the floor: a business taking 200 minutes a month pays for capacity it never uses.

Certus AI: a restaurant phone that takes the order

Certus AI is narrower and better for it. It takes pickup and delivery orders item by item, reads the total back, and sends the order into Toast, Square, Clover, SkyTab or Aloha. It books tables through OpenTable and can send a payment link by text.

Its homepage lists $250 a month with ordering included, no setup fee, monthly billing and a 30-day money-back guarantee. Spanish is included as standard. Certus also publishes a comparison table that prices rival restaurant products higher; treat that as the vendor's claim, since we did not read those rivals' pages.

Vocapable: the cheapest real receptionist

Vocapable's receptionist costs $49 a month with a US local number and 250 AI minutes, or $39 if you bring your own Twilio account. It answers questions, captures messages and follows routing rules. Starter handles up to two calls at once, which is the limit to check if your phone rings in bursts.

echowin: per-minute, multilingual, built for agencies

echowin has one pay-as-you-go plan: $0.20 a minute and $10 a month per number, with a small free credit to start. Its agency suite adds grey-label or white-label branding at a monthly fee. That makes it the natural pick for a marketing agency reselling receptionists to local clients, and an expensive one for a single busy office.

Vertical agents that sell on a quote

Several AI receptionists on HokAI are built for one industry and publish no price list:

• Toma and OSAM answer car dealership calls and book service appointments.
• Broccoli AI and Elyos AI answer, book and dispatch for trades and home-service contractors.
• Care GP handles admin calls for Australian GP clinics.
• NexusCall AI is a bilingual receptionist that qualifies and books calls.
• Leaping AI books appointments over voice and text for call centres.

A vertical agent usually knows your industry's software and vocabulary on day one. The cost is a sales cycle and a contract you cannot compare line by line.

Voice-agent platforms for builders and agencies

These sell minutes and parts. Someone has to assemble them.

Retell AI: the fastest platform to a working agent

Retell AI prices voice agents at $0.07 to $0.31 a minute depending on the model and voice you choose, and gives new accounts free credit to test with.

Its pay-as-you-go plan includes 20 concurrent calls, agent templates, simulation testing, webhooks and API access. Its own voice infrastructure costs $0.055 a minute.

Its cheapest voices add $0.015 a minute on top.

Enterprise adds HIPAA with a BAA, SSO, custom data terms and higher concurrency. If you are an agency, the 20 free concurrent calls are the line to read twice: Vapi's free tier allows four.

Vapi: maximum control, more line items

Vapi's pricing is a $0.05-a-minute hosting fee with every model passed through at cost. You choose the transcriber, such as Deepgram, the language model and the voice, such as Cartesia or ElevenLabs, and each has its own per-minute rate.

The free tier includes a small credit, one Vapi number, four concurrent calls and 14 days of data retention. Core costs $29 a month for five numbers, 10 concurrent calls, 30 days of retention and zero data retention as an option.

Extra concurrent lines are $10 each per month.

Bolna AI, Plivo and AgentPhone

Bolna AI is built for Indian-language phone calls. Its volume packs start at $15 for 250 minutes, which is 6 cents a minute, with bigger packs cheaper and pilots capped at 25 concurrent calls.

Plivo's voice agents cost $0.03 a minute excluding telephony, which is the lowest agent rate we read. Plivo is also a carrier, so inbound minutes run $0.008 on the same bill.

New accounts get $10 of credit with no card required.

AgentPhone solves a different problem: it gives an AI agent you already built its own US or Canadian number for $3 a month. Our AgentPhone explainer covers when that beats a full platform.

For the wider category, including transcription and voice-cloning tools that are not receptionists, see the voice assistant directory and our buyer's guide to AI voice tools.

Call data, recording consent and HIPAA

Every product here records or transcribes calls, because that is how it learns what happened. Ask where those recordings live and for how long.

Vapi sells HIPAA as an add-on at $2,000 a month, which changes the maths for a small clinic completely. Plivo's BAA sits on its Enterprise plan, which starts at $1,000 a month.

For a dental or medical office, a turnkey receptionist without a signed BAA is not an option for calls that touch patient details. Ask for the BAA before the trial, not after.

Outbound calls carry a separate rule. On 8 February 2024 the US Federal Communications Commission ruled that AI-generated voices count as "artificial" under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, so automated outbound calls need the consent the law already required for robocalls. An AI receptionist that only answers inbound calls is not what that ruling targeted, but the follow-up callbacks and reminder calls many plans offer are.

Recording consent is set by state and country. Some US states require every party to agree. Most products play a recorded notice; confirm yours does before you forward the main line.

Who should skip an AI receptionist

Not every business should buy one, and the honest case against is stronger than vendors admit.

If you take fewer than five calls a day and most are from existing clients, a good voicemail greeting and a text-back app cost nothing and lose very little. If your calls are long, emotional or high-stakes, such as a criminal defence intake or a bereavement call, a human answering service is still the safer first voice. And if your callers mostly want a price, a website chat or a booking link may answer them faster than any phone agent.

There is also a real case for the platforms over the flat services, even for non-technical owners. At 300 minutes a month, Bolna or Plivo cost a tenth of NextPhone, and freelancers build agents on Retell and Vapi for a fixed fee. If you can find a builder you trust, that route can be both cheaper and more tailored.

Our answer: the platform route wins on cost only if someone keeps maintaining it. Prompts drift, calendars change and edge cases pile up. The turnkey services fold that upkeep into the fee. For a team with no technical owner, that is worth the premium. For an agency or a developer, it is not, which is why our picks split exactly there. Our small business AI assistant guide covers the cheaper tools that sit around the phone.

How to run a one-week trial without losing a caller

Most of these products offer free credit or a trial, so test before you commit. This sequence keeps real customers safe:

1. Get a new number from the vendor and do not forward your main line yet.
2. Load your website, hours, prices and the five questions callers ask most.
3. Call it 20 times yourself, including an angry caller, a wrong number and someone asking for a person.
4. Check every transfer, booking and CRM write landed where it should.
5. Forward only after-hours calls for the first week, then read every transcript.
6. Move daytime overflow across once the transcripts read the way you want.

If you are comparing it with chat and email support, our customer support tools guide and the customer support directory list the other channels. Builders choosing between frameworks should also read our AI agent builders roundup.

Other names worth knowing

• Solvea bundles a voice receptionist with chat, email and WhatsApp in one help desk, which suits e-commerce brands.
• AI Refounder answers an online store's calls and walks shoppers to checkout.
• Marr Labs sells a compliance-heavy phone agent through a sales-led process.

We did not read current pricing for these three on this pass, so they are not in the cost tables.

What would flip these picks in 2027

Watch for any of these.

• A per-minute platform ships a true no-code receptionist. If Retell or Vapi released a template a non-technical owner could finish in an hour, the turnkey premium would be hard to justify below 1,000 minutes.
• Flat-fee services add minute caps. NextPhone's unlimited calls are the core of its case. A cap or a fair-use limit would push it back toward the per-minute pack.
• HIPAA gets cheaper. A $2,000 monthly add-on keeps small clinics on quote-only vertical agents. A BAA on an entry plan would open the platforms to every dental office.

We will re-read every pricing page in this guide by January 2027, when the year in the title changes and most vendors reset their plans.

Frequently asked questions

How much does an AI receptionist cost in 2026?

Entry prices we read on vendor pages on 28 October 2026 run from $49 a month at Vocapable with 250 minutes included, to $199 at NextPhone and $250 at Certus AI with unlimited calls. Per-minute platforms start lower, at $0.03 to $0.31 a minute, but you or an agency must build the agent.

Is an AI receptionist worth it for a small business?

It is worth it if you regularly miss calls while working and those calls are new customers. If you take fewer than five calls a day, mostly from existing clients, a voicemail greeting and a text-back app lose very little. Run a one-week after-hours trial and read the transcripts before deciding.

What is the best AI receptionist for a law firm?

NextPhone is the strongest fit we found, because its plans integrate with Clio Manage, Clio Grow and MyCase and charge a flat fee with unlimited calls. For sensitive intake, such as criminal defence, keep a human answering service as the first voice.

Can an AI receptionist handle medical or dental calls?

Only if the vendor signs a Business Associate Agreement under HIPAA. Retell AI and Plivo offer one on enterprise plans, and Vapi sells HIPAA as a $2,000 monthly add-on. Ask for the agreement before the trial starts.

What is the difference between an AI receptionist and a voice agent platform?

An AI receptionist is a finished service you switch on and configure in plain language. A voice-agent platform such as Retell AI or Vapi sells the parts, speech recognition, a model, a voice and telephony, by the minute. Platforms are cheaper per minute and more flexible, but someone has to build and maintain the agent.

Covered in this guide

• AgentPhone: AgentPhone gives any AI agent its own US or Canadian phone number via 1 API call, with unified voice, SMS, real-time transcription, and built-in MCP support.
• AI Refounder: AI voice agent that answers an online store's calls 24/7 and guides shoppers to checkout. Installs from the Shopify App Store in 1 click.
• Bolna AI: Voice AI agent platform for Indian-language phone calls, with a no-code studio, REST API, bulk campaigns and an MIT-licensed core on GitHub.
• Broccoli AI: Broccoli AI runs named voice agents that answer calls, book jobs on ServiceTitan, and chase leads for trades contractors, with an 85%+ booking rate.
• Care GP: Care GP deploys AI agents to Australian GP clinics running BP Premier, automating clinical document filing and after-hours phone reception.
• Cartesia: Real-time voice AI for developers: Sonic text-to-speech in dozens of languages, Ink speech-to-text and phone voice agents, with a free plan to test it.
• Certus AI: Voice AI phone agent for restaurants that takes orders and bookings 24/7 and sends them to the POS. A Y Combinator startup.
• Deepgram: Real-time voice AI APIs for developers: speech-to-text under 300ms, TTS, and voice agents. Used by 200,000+ developers.
• echowin: AI phone receptionist that answers calls 24/7 in 30+ languages with 7,000+ integrations for small businesses and agencies.
• Elyos AI: Elyos AI runs six autonomous voice and chat agents for UK trades and field service firms, answering calls and booking jobs 24/7.
• Leaping AI: Voice and SMS AI callers for home improvement lead desks: they pick up, ring back cold leads and book jobs in 15+ languages. Y Combinator W25.
• Marr Labs: Vox, Marr Labs' phone agent, answers calls in under 1 second and enforces TCPA and HIPAA compliance live for regulated industries.
• NextPhone: AI receptionist for law firms and service businesses: answers every call 24/7, books into your calendar, on flat monthly plans with unlimited calls.
• NexusCall AI: AI phone receptionist 'Ava' answers service-business calls in under 2 rings, books jobs 24/7 in English and Spanish. Plans from $297/mo.
• OSAM: AI voice agents that answer dealership calls and texts, book appointments, and sync every booking to the DMS in real time.
• Plivo: AI voice agents layered on Plivo's own carrier-grade telephony, billed at $0.03 per agent minute plus metered telephony fees.
• Retell AI: Retell AI builds and deploys realistic AI phone agents with 600ms latency, handling 50M+ monthly calls, and HIPAA/SOC 2 compliance. Rated 4.8/5 on G2 by 1,414 teams.
• Rootle: Voice AI platform automating sales, support, and recruitment calls in 20+ Indian languages, with first 100 calls free.
• Solvea: Solvea is a no-code AI receptionist handling phone, SMS, email, WhatsApp, and live chat for small and mid-market businesses. Free tier with 1,000 credits/month; paid plans from $30/month.
• Toma: Founded in 2024, Toma builds AI voice Coworkers that answer every inbound dealership call and book service or sales appointments without a human on the line.
• Vapi: Voice AI platform where developers bring their own LLM, speech-to-text and telephony; Amazon Ring picked it over 40 rivals in 2026.
• Vocapable: AI receptionist for incoming calls and outbound calling for sales, shifts and feedback, on six published monthly plans with usage billed per AI minute.

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